MariaDB Service Start Stuck at Activating

MariaDB and MySQL

Some times when MariaDB installed first time, it runs ok but after System reboot, its start creating problems i.e. MariaDB service stuck at Activating state.

if you try to start it, its seems keep waiting in staring state and when check status using command

systemctl status mariadb.service

its shows status like

Active: activating (start)

in journalctl -xe output you see errors like  AVC apparmor=”DENIED”

Reason for this problem is that, you probably have MySQL installed beforehand. Mean first this server had MySQL server installed and upgraded it to MariaDB server. It is a known bug: MySQL installs an AppArmor profile, and the MariaDB package fails to properly uninstall it (see details on Launchpad).

Solution:

Use these commands to solve the problem (adapted from the bug mentioned above):

sudo systemctl stop mariadb

echo “/usr/sbin/mysqld { }” | sudo tee /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld

sudo apparmor_parser -v -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld

This should display output like this Removal succeeded for “/usr/sbin/mysqld”.

Then, very important step is:

sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.sbin.mysqld

Without above command, some AppArmor profile comes back after reboot (not sure from where), which prevents MariaDB from loading at all (unable to load libaio).

Now you can then start MariaDB with

sudo systemctl start mariadb

Hopefully now it will work ok. check status by

sudo systemctl status mariadb

Background Reason

If you previously had MySQL installed, it activated an AppArmor profile which is incompatible with MariaDB.

apt-get remove –purge only removes the profile, but does not deactivate/unload it. Only manually unloading it lets MariaDB work unhindered by AppArmor.

 

Ref: Ale ServerFault

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